'Carrie' is a well-acted remake

Friday

Oct 18, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By JANE HORWITZ, The Washington Post Writers Group

"Carrie" R — Since the first film ("Carrie," R, 1976) adapted from Stephen King's novel is considered a classic of the horror movie genre, this remake has a lot to live up to, and it succeeds in many ways. It is not for middle-schoolers, but teens 16 and older could find this story of a girl smothered at home by religious fanaticism and bullied at school by mean girls a mighty ripping yarn. Director Kimberly Peirce makes good use of special effects when the tormented Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz) uses her new-found telekinetic powers to cause objects and people to hurtle across rooms, eventually with lethal results. Actress Julianne Moore's haunted mix of god-fearing sexual guilt and mental instability as Margaret White, Carrie's mom, is terrific. The film opens with a flashback showing Margaret praying and in pain on her bed, convinced she is dying. When instead the head of a baby emerges, she nearly kills it with scissors, then relents and embraces it. Cut to the present. Carrie is now a painfully shy, much-teased high-schooler. She has a horrendous moment in the locker room when she finds blood on herself and doesn't realize it's her first period. The other girls taunt her and pelt her with sanitary supplies. The meanest girl, Chris (Portia Doubleday), shoots a video and posts it online. This gets Chris banned from the prom. Sue (Gabriella Wilde), a nice girl, gets her boyfriend Tommy (Ansel Elgort) to ask Carrie to the prom as a kindness. But Chris and her evil boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell) — John Travolta played him in the original — plan revenge. At the prom, when Tommy and Carrie are crowned king and queen, they sneak in and dump a bucket of pig's blood onto Carrie. She uses her powers to turn the dance into a mass killing.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The horror elements are not exceptionally graphic for an R, though we do see people killed by falling objects and impaled by glass shards. Carrie's mom cuts herself, smacks and bangs her head to mute guilty feelings. The bad teens kill a pig with a hammer. We hear it die and see Chris use a knife to bleed it. One teen couple has fairly graphic sex. Another makes out heavily. The dialogue includes strong profanity.

"The Fifth Estate" R — News-savvy high-schoolers have a good reason to check out "The Fifth Estate." Director Bill Condon and actor Benedict Cumberbatch seem to capture the persona of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — his idealism, megalomania and self-absorption in equal measures. The film goes into — for a news junky — fascinating detail about the tens of thousands of government and financial secrets Assange and his now-estranged, but initially worshipful, colleague Daniel Berg (excellent Daniel Bruhl) released in 2010, via Assange's supposedly safe and unhackable WikiLeaks site. The R rating is almost entirely for language.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Aside from strong profanity — much use of the F-word and related epithets — the film is more of a PG-13. It includes tense moments when a U.S. contact in Libya and his family must get across the border into Egypt. There are a couple of moderately steamy sexual situations between Berg and his girlfriend (Anke Domscheit), but they are not explicit.